SEPTEMBER 3, 2018
How Trump Can Save Free Speech from Big Tech
By Rich Logis
Politicians aren't saviors or messiahs. Devoutly secular worship of government – the belief that the State (capital S) is God – is inherent in the Democratic Party's ideology and marketing.
At the risk of belying my adamant opposition to idolatry, I implore President Trump to save free speech on the internet.
The president has been busy keeping many of the promises he made as a candidate, so perhaps my request is unfair. I'm mindful, however, that he has similarly ambitious and entrepreneurial children, who are active on social media.
Politics is sales, and here's my pitch.
Americans Are Powerless
From Dennis Prager to The New York Post to Alex Jones, among others, we've watched the Big Tech Industrial Complex purge speech and rhetoric with which it disagrees.
It's no small irony that the same tech companies that manipulated search data, such as Google, to work to help Hillary Clinton – she of the faux socialist resistance to the rich and powerful – constitute an absurdly rich and absurdly powerful Brahmin-like conglomerate of omnipotent tech demigods.
Think long and hard about this: what, really, can we the American people do about shadowbanning? Or sudden, abrupt removals of comments or posts? Or popular videos that are placed on page 425 of a search engine, or, worse, are blocked from public viewings due to creepily arbitrary "hate speech" standards? Perhaps most disheartening is that we don't know what we don't know, and now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's likely that the tech companies will never be able to restore trust in their impartiality and integrity – much the same way many Americans will never again trust the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex). People buy and decide based on perception, and the irreversible perception the Big Tech Industrial Complex has cultivated is a very un-American hostility toward conservative political beliefs.
Sure, conservatives and America First voters could cease use of tech and social media platforms – which, in a way, is a win for Big Tech.
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What about regulation, First Amendment lawsuits and antitrust litigation? All sound promising, in theory, but do we really want the federal government anywhere near the Internet? How, exactly, would the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission keep up with the 24-7 flow of data and content created by billions of users? Answer: They won't, and Big Tech regulation would just be more Big Government – an information superhighway iteration of Cash for Clunkers. Big Tech would be, at any given moment, years ahead of even the most rigorous regulatory requirements, and don't get me started on Attorney General Jefferson Sessions.
Furthermore, is there really an antitrust or First Amendment case to be made? When the federal government won its landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft in 1998, it won on the legal basis that Microsoft was stifling its competition. Pray, tell: how do the current tactics of Big Tech stifle competition? Prager, Jones, and The New York Post all have their own websites; I'm unaware of any evidence that Big Tech has done anything to directly obstruct their abilities to get noticed and found on any internet search engine.
As John Stossell, one of my favorite Fox personalities, remarked recently, the tech companies likely have the constitutional right to kick whomever they want off their platforms and app markets. Want to sue them? Go right ahead. Taking down, for example, Apple, the world's first trillion-dollar-valued company, would be easy-breezy, wouldn't it? Though I'm not a bettin' man, I suspect that the same justices who sided with baker Jack Phillips would side with Big Tech.
Trump the Tech Icon?
So if more government, lawyers, and playing nice won't work, what would?
This is where the president steps in. He and his family have made a vast fortune. Providing a viable alternative to his tens of millions of unwavering supporters – in which users post, comment, and upload free of the tyranny of Big Brother-ish uncertainty that no one will see their content due to manipulation of algorithms designed by foreign workers who can't even vote in our elections – would make an Earth-quaking impact overnight.
The president himself had said that without Twitter, he might not be president. If true, that's a testament to him and his former digital media director (and current 2020 campaign chairman) Brad Parscale, more than Twitter.
Trump Valley. Trumpbook. Trumpitter. TrumpTube. Trumpterest. Trumpagram. Hell, create a new search engine, free of manipulation: Trumpoogle. Name me one Trump-supporter you know who wouldn't utilize the full suite of the Trump Valley platform; you can't. (This is the part where Ben Shapiro and Senators Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse lament the "echo chamber.")
I have a two-reason theory as to why we've not seen a Trump-branded mode of online communication: first, the president and family don't know how to make the many moving parts synchronize (I do, but I won't yet reveal; as The Joker said in The Dark Knight, if you're good at something, never do it for free); second, he and his family don't know how to monetize it.
Like everything else they touch, Democrats have destroyed speech on the internet, irrespective of its erudition or asininity. But there's never been a better time to use technology to continue strengthening the America First political movement that has so frightened Big Tech, it's gone to, and continues to go to, great lengths to suppress and make vanished anything even remotely resembling pro-Trump or conservatism.
Mr. President, please consider what I'm saying. It all sounds impossibly daunting, but so was your electoral win – a win that was America's political black swan event. At the 2016 RNC convention, in which you were formally named the GOP nominee, your daughter, Ivanka, boldly stated that the election could make the impossible possible.
Trump needs to embolden and unify his side. Let him send the TessioRepublicans, eager to betray us, as Sal Tessio did to Michael Corleone, as well as the Democratic Party and their corporate sycophants, reeling further into their downward spiral. Let him channel your inner Sonny Corleone and take it personal, as many of your supporters have.
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Huh? Listen Joe, I'm just a simple guy. Can you maybe explain what this article is even about? I sure can't follow it. It just started talking about computers being false idols and what not... and I got lost in the nutter butter.
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